Why do people not listen when you say no? Why do they think you are too stupid or too young to understand? Why do they think you are too shy to reply? Why do they keep badgering you until you will say yes?
A library is the door to many lives.
I prayed to trees. This was easier than praying directly to God. There was nearly always a tree nearby.
The sea, the sea, the sea. It rolled and rolled and called to me. Come in, it said, come in.
What exactly did people do when they had all the time in the world and could do whatever they liked?
Young children are naturally so philosophical. They ask: ‘What is real? What is truth?’ They have to learn it; they don’t automatically know it. To them, it’s a game. You can study this for years in college, and yet you probably asked it when you were four or five years old.
Once ‘Walk Two Moons’ received the Newbery Medal, I decided to write full-time. Partly because there seemed to be an audience out there who wanted to read what I wanted to write, and partly because I could now support myself financially through writing.
I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I’ve written mainly novels ever since.
I cannot just write a frivolous book, a la-di-da book. Everything isn’t la-di-da. There is something that’s going to pull you up short. I want to reassure young readers. I want to comfort them, to not fear the unexpected.
Each child brings so much joy and hope into the world, and that is reason enough for being here. As you grow older, you will contribute something else to this world, and only you can discover what that is.
When I read good stories, I want to write good stories too.
I enjoy receiving and giving realistic fiction, for both children and adults, with strong characters, beautiful language, and humane visions.
As readers can probably tell from my books, I love the outdoors.
I don’t remember titles of books or authors from when I was young. I remember the title of only one book, which was ‘The Timber Toes.’ I remember it was a family of little wooden people who lived in the woods, and for some reason that stayed with me.
It seems to me that we can’t explain all the truly awful things in the world like war and murder and brain tumors, and we can’t fix these things, so we look at the frightening things that are closer to us and we magnify them until they burst open. Inside is something that we can manage, something that isn’t as awful as it had a first seemed. It is a relief to discover that although there might be axe murderers and kidnappers in the world, most people seem a lot like us: sometimes afraid and sometimes brave, sometimes cruel and sometimes kind.
Being a mother is like trying to hold a wolf by the ears,” Gram said. “If you have three or four –or more – chickabiddies, you’re dancing on a hot griddle all the time. You don’t have time to think about anything else. And if you’ve only got one or two, it’s almost harder. You have room left over – empty spaces that you think you’ve got to fill up.
I had not said anything about what had happened the day before – about being scared down to my very bones when I thought they had left me. I don’t know what came over me. Ever since my mother left us that April day, I suspected that everyone was going to leave, one by one.
I think Mr. Robert Frost has a little too much time on his hands.
She told how the fear had slipped away through the year, ‘slipped away silently and secretly’, and how we mustn’t be afraid to try new things.
I wondered If things that might seem frightening could lose their hold over you. I wondered If we find the people we need when we need them. I wondered If we attract our future by some sort of invisible force, or If we are drawn to it by a similar force. I felt I was turning a corner and that change was afoot.